Crack Cloud is a Canadian punk collective that began in 2015 as the solo project of lead vocalist and drummer Zach Choy. Once boasting over 20 members, the group now comprises Choy, his brother Will, Aleem Khan, Bryce Cloghesy, Will Choy, Emma Acs, Eve Adams, Nathaniel Philips, and creative director Aidan Pontarini. Formed in the midst of the opioid crisis in Vancouver, some of its members were former addicts in the process of rehabilitation and some were mental health workers; Crack Cloud served as a healing mechanism that later became enmeshed with what Zach Choy, in a more recent interview, described as “mechanisms of press.” (“Road to recovery, an early talking point,” he sings in one of their new songs.) Following a 2018 collection composed of two independently released EPs, they reinvented and expanded their sound – obtuse yet ferociously cathartic, maximalist and earnest – over their first two LPs, 2020’s Pain Olympics and 2022’s Tough Baby.
After a long stretch of touring in 2022, Crack Cloud had the opportunity to take pause and reconsider the trajectory and mythology of the band. This led them to the Mojave desert, whose simultaneous expanse and quietude made it the perfect place to record their latest album, Red Mile. Free from daily distractions, they were able to both loosen and hone in their approach while zooming out to examine the histories that define and extend beyond their own narrative. It’s a tuneful, snarky, and meditative record that comments on the very same medium they’re engaged in, touching on creative stagnation, existential anxiety, and jadedness bordering on nihilism. The effect is disarming but far from paralyzing. Leaning in closer, we can hear the nuances of the tropes that bind us, and soldier on.
We caught up with Crack Cloud’s Zach Choy and Aleem Khan for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about the duality of touring and being home, recording in the desert, embracing uncertainty, and more.
In a statement, you mentioned how exhausting the pace of touring was in the years preceding Red Mile. How do you now see the relationship between playing live and the creative output of the band, and did making Red Mile feel like an escape from that cycle?
Zach Choy: As far as the dichotomy between touring and being home, or being home and working on music – I feel like there’s even separation within that microcosm, separation between being creative at home and just being at home. I would say there’s absolutely a multiplicity to all of these experiences. It’s been really interesting to have more time off than we’ve had since we started touring Pain Olympics four or five years ago. With all of this afforded space to reflect and rebuild a symbiotic relationship with being at home with family and living some semblance of normalcy, there’s been constant scrutiny as to what this duality is and what it serves for us as artists. And I think this is by no means a unique sentiment. I’ve spoken to many musicians on the road, and it’s a similar feeling of, every time you go back to touring, you’re kind of tearing a Band-Aid off a wound that was almost healed. I think it was [Grian Chatten] from Fontaines D.C. who said that years ago during breakfast in a hotel, and it’s kind of stuck with me. Psychically, it’s quite an astute analogy.
For the longest time, I felt like these two paths weren’t compatible. And to this day, I feel like maybe they’re not. But that doesn’t mean they don’t inform or necessitate each other, at least as far as my own temperament goes. I really do thrive on the chaos that both offer: the Yin and the Yang. I think we’ve really honed in on that with Red Mile as far as giving ourselves time to contemplate the insane momentum of this journey, and kind of surrendering a bit of that momentum, becoming comfortable with the more prevalent feelings of exhaustion and ambivalence; not shying away from those feelings as creative modalities and opportunities to explore.
The process of writing itself is referenced throughout the album – you sing about writing while “feeling a little static,” writing with “some vague intent,” struggling with writing from experience. What opened up or invigorated that process for you, and what did you gain from making it a thread on the album?
ZC: Crack Cloud started in 2015, so nine years later, we started to feel a bit of an identity crisis. It was slowly creeping, I think, on all of us to different degrees over the course of a few years. There was this juncture within the narrative or the mythology that was built around our group. When you have this mythology prescribed to you, it begins to feel like a shackle. That’s also just age, I think – as we live and grow, we have new insights, revisit feelings, reconsider. The song you’re referring to, ‘Epitaph’, was very much guided by this stream-of-consciousness approach to feeling stifled and uncertain, a lack of confidence about what felt like an imperative.
As far as what I thought was important to communicate – it doesn’t bode well with any of us when we feel like we’re taking the platform for granted. We have an expectation for ourselves to use it purposefully and in a thoughtful way. So I resorted to this stream-of-consciousness style of writing that I found really useful when we wrote ‘Philosopher’s Calling’. It turned into an exploration of the lineage of concepts, the lineage of words and storytelling, just the whole epistemological institution of historical accounting. It’s fascinating how the medium has transformed from pictographs to oral to written and beyond. I suppose that song is a sort of existential question that I’m posing even just to myself on a micro-scale: what kind of lineage am I participating in, and where is it all going on a teleological level? History, I mean, and literature in general, and the utility it has for people. Just getting lost in these thoughts. The desert is pretty desolate, so it was easy for me to melt into this historical, introspective thought process. You don’t often think about these things – I don’t – in the city. I’m really distracted by noise. So, it was fun to contemplate the ancients and to contemplate Nietzsche losing his mind – the whole breadth of human thought.
Aleem Khan: On the front of the music itself for that song, the idea behind the simplicity in the music – the instruments, the choices that may seem too pop, too clean – that’s the point. What I’m noticing, even though the album’s not even out yet, is how quick people are to judge the surface of this record. You are the brunt of the joke if you’re judging the surface of this record. You are the punchline, essentially. To write a song like ‘Epitaph’ with a very simplistic chord progression, a very simplistic melody, really forces you to listen to the lyrics, which is very difficult for people to engage in on a wide scale these days. That’s why we have the advent of pop music, so we can feel good for a couple of minutes and go back to our jobs. Taking a stream-of-consciousness style and putting that over pop music freaks people out. It’s not easy to digest.
On ‘The Medium’, you zero in on the history and tropes of rock and pop and even punk music, the way these genres have been exploited by the industry. One of the things that struck me is how the song ends with you recognizing yourself as the medium, this “Nothing matters” attitude that’s far from cynical. How did you land on that conclusion?
ZC: Yeah, I love your interpretation. I think there’s utility and purpose to all of these emotions as creative devices. It’s fun to blend pop with a more sardonic attitude, they balance each other nicely. I think that’s a fun, effective way of representing how things are more nuanced, or can be, and there’s beauty in that. To this marriage of critical analysis as well as a celebration of what is – the surface itself, as much as it’s not the whole substance of what we’re doing or many artists have done in the past, is beautiful, too. I would say the same about the melody. It’s about having fun with the minutiae of all these cultural stepping stones that evoke different feelings for different people.
AK: You have to try something new. If you’re not, you’re doing something wrong, I think. I think we all embrace that in our day-to-day lives, in our work, or within our relationships. It can’t be the same forever.
ZC: I personally don’t think people have to, but I know you, I know me, and I know the people that are in Crack Cloud, and I know that we have to for our own sanity.
AK: Yeah, it’s not a prescription. Approaching something, for us, it’s always going to be different. And it’s always going to be received in a way that you can never predict.
Aleem, how do you reflect on that period of crisis or uncertainty that Zach was referring to?
AK: I guess my personal philosophy, as I get older, is understanding and embracing uncertainty, like Zach was saying – really sitting with it instead of running away from it. There’s been a lot of talk among us – Zach, Bryce, and I – about how you really have to understand that you come to this planet alone, you get to meet people, and it’s all borrowed. Relationships – it’s all borrowed stuff. A record coming out is a borrowed experience. You can buy it, but it’s a borrowed experience. But music, it really stays with you forever. When we were working on this record, in my mind, I wanted to compose things musically that had a universal feeling, really simple emotions – and we only have a handful. Now, we can really communicate those things because everybody’s heard the chords over and over again. You can say whatever you want over those chords. What we chose to say made the most sense to complete our understanding of how even the pop vehicle has been used and has influenced pop culture. When you remove the notes, the music, the clothing, all this shit, what you’re left with, realistically, is a body, and we’re all the fucking same. I hope that comes through.
Uncertainty can be your friend as well as your enemy. I think you gotta embrace doubt, listen to other people, and be open to your own mistakes. That’s very important for me and made me feel validated when bringing things to the table to Zach and Bryce – this melody here or that thing there. It felt very naturalistic.
In terms of the recording process, how did being in the desert affect your headspace? Are there aspects of the record you feel are indebted to that environment?
ZC: I think it was a perfect storm for us to end up in the desert. It was practically circumstantial. Bryce and Isabelle [Anderson] and their newborn child had moved there, which is to this day a very confounding decision. But it’s so beautiful there, and we decided to record there. In retrospect, it was what needed to happen. I’m a somewhat fatalistic person sometimes, but there seemed to be a higher reason for us to be in the Mojave, away from everything. It felt like the move to make after a lot of turbulence on the road the previous year and a general anxiety and ambivalence I’ve already expressed. The space and sheer expanse, the physicality of the desert, absolutely had a lot to do with our creative decisions. It brought a kind of candidness I don’t think wouldn’t have gotten in the city. Crack Cloud, as an entity, the way we produce is usually far more contrived and narrative-driven, with a lot of tinkering and calculating, just getting surgical. To abandon that, to be antithetical to what we’re usually about, was just true to who we were and how we were feeling. The desert was so perfect, even as just a metaphor.
Was there a sense of relaxing into your identity as a band? Was that something that appealed to you, given the urgency and maximalism that might have had a weighing effect previously?
ZC: I would say that every album we do is a pretty true iteration of not only ourselves but the phenomena and minutiae of what’s happening within our community and, to a greater extent, within the culture. Red Mile is no exception. It feels like another authentic undertaking to understand our own psyche and be a filter for our world, both inner and outer. I expect the next one to be of the same spiritual cloth, maybe not stylistically or aesthetically, but in having the freedom to be fluid and to follow our hearts – that has been the prerogative from day one. I think there was also a lot going on in our personal lives – newborn babies and newfound stability – and that really plays into it, too. The celebration of that, but also the existentialism of it, is a more universal thing that everyone can understand.
We’ve talked about style and themes, but I wonder if the overarching mood of the record is something you can compare to previous records. I feel like Tough Baby was brighter and more redemptive than Pain Olympics, and I’m curious if you think Red Mile continues that trajectory in any specific way, and if there are ways it turned out darker than expected.
ZC: Red Mile, for me personally, is way more unsure by design. I hear the exhaustion that we really leaned into. In a brighter sense, there is this kind of solidarity that completely reoriented the group. For instance, the song ‘Ballad of Billy’ is my brother Will’s first song that he wrote. Just the inclusion of that song on the album feels really fulfilling, even for him and me to share. He’s quite a bit younger than all of us. He started touring with us at age 17 and is 25 now, so he’s been through a lot. It felt like a profound full-circle moment for him to rise to the occasion. For me, it was just far less rigid, and I think that was important.
We did take lot of inspiration initially from more experimental albums – the White Album is a really easy one to refer to, just the fluidity of it. I don’t think we achieved that by any means, but on a philosophical level, there’s always been this attitude with Crack Cloud where the next record may very well be our last, and that still could be the case. With Pain Olympics and Tough Baby, that was really the attitude: if we’re going to make one more album, what do we want to say? Will it stand the test of time? That’s so arbitrary and subjective in retrospect. With Red Mile, we gave up on those lofty expectations, feeling like we owed it to ourselves to put together a sort of middle-of-the-road record where we’re just honouring the idea that music is therapy and self-discovery and psychoanalysis. That’s what came out, and it’s going to sound really different next time.
What was your initial reaction to ‘Ballad of Billy?
ZC: Will brought the chords to the room, and we put it together within like three hours, recorded it off the floor. I told Will, “This is all you, man. You have a lot you’ve internalized over the years. If you’ve learned anything, please be vulnerable, be candid, spill your guts out. This is all transient, and we built this for you and us to confront things through art and music.” So, my relationship to that song is purely through the association and love I have for Will as an individual. That’s how I contextualize it.
AK: Will joined us for the tail end of our sessions at Joshua Tree, he came in after we’d been there for a little while. We were working our asses off. Our pal Jared [Drake], who was touring with us at the time, was playing bass. Will was playing his Stratocaster. I played electric guitar. Zach, of course, was on drums. Bryce I think at that time was playing saxophone in the room. So this was definitely propelled by our initial touchdown there as a trio, working on this album together. We’re all musicians first, and then we became artists, but that song felt the most like we were young, in our living rooms playing on little practice amps together. It felt like we were going to play our very first show at a little bar in Calgary. There was something really beautiful about that aspect. Will, being from a younger generation than us but being Zach’s brother and frankly a backbone in this group. It was a celebratory feeling that you can hear on that song. You hear it through the pianos, the overdubs, Will’s guitar solo, his vocals. I think that song will surprise people a lot.
Similar to Zach’s conversation with Will, I remember Tough Baby opening with a message from your father about how music is an excellent way to let your anger out. Looking back on being young and what music meant then, do you feel like the more you write and move forward, the less anger there is to let out? Or does it take on new shapes?
ZC: Thank you for pointing that out. I appreciate you seeing that parallel with my father’s message. I would say that anger, frustration, doubt – these feelings we might umbrella into the category of negativity all have utility, it’s just about the application and the space you’re using and where you direct them. In a way, I’m far more balanced now than ever, but these feelings, for a lot of us, including myself, will always orbit around our experience on Earth. To have music and art as a general mechanism to deal with these things is such a privilege and so vital for me as a person. It keeps me balanced and helps me contextualize my emotions in a way that is contained and experimental. And maybe, in the best-case scenario, creates a sense of solidarity for someone else in the world who may be feeling the same thing.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Crack Cloud’s Red Mile is out now via Jagjaguwar.
